Interestingly the report suggests that the effects of tort reform, which contributed to a slowdown in claims growth in the mid-2000s in the U.S., were a one-off benefit and will no longer suppress claims growth to the same degree.

Tort reform in the U.S. has focused on medical malpractice and class action claims, the report says.

Many early studies concluded that medical malpractice reforms such as limits on lawyers’ fees and non-economic compensation were effective in reducing medical malpractice liability. However, some of these caps were later overturned by state supreme courts.

Despite passage of the Class Action Fairness Act in 2005, empirical evidence on the effects of federal class action reform in the U.S. remains inconclusive, sigma adds.

The report also warns that litigation funding, in which a third-party funding company pays the costs of litigation and is paid only if the litigation is successful, is still in its infancy in the U.S. but developing.

Drought continues to make the headlines, with the latest U.S. Drought Monitor showing moderate to exceptional drought covers 30.6 percent of the contiguous United States.

Its weekly update also shows that 82 percent of the state of California is in a state of extreme or exceptional drought. Reservoir levels in the state continued to decline, and groundwater wells continued to go dry, the U.S. Drought Monitor says.

The LA Times reports that California’s historic drought has 14 communities on the brink of waterlessness. It quotes Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, saying that communities that have made the list are often small and isolated and have relied on a single source of water without backup sources.

However, Quinn also tells the LA Times that if the drought continues, larger communities could face their own significant problems.

A recent article at CFO.com by Lauren Kelley Koopman, a director in PwC’s Sustainable Business Solutions practice, makes the point that when water-related disruptions affect operations, companies can suffer significant profit and losses and pay higher prices for goods in the supply chain.

According to the report, up to 65 percent of climate risks can be averted by adaptation measures including infrastructure development, technology advancements, shifts in systems and behaviors such as improved building codes and land use management, and financial measures.

The global re/insurance industry plays a vital role in planning and implementation of such measures. As the GRF says:

Citing a 2012 IPCC report, the GRF notes that extreme weather events, such as storms, floods, droughts, heat waves as well as rising sea levels, crop failures and water shortages have become more numerous and severe.

Reinsurers can make an important contribution by developing protection and mitigation-finance solutions to address the specific challenges that climate change presents.

At the same time, the GRF says reinsurers are advancing understanding of climate change-related risk through the development of natural catastrophe models and via collaboration with universities and scientific institutions. They are also monitoring relevant phenomena such as urbanization, population concentration, property and commercial activity in high-risk areas along the coasts and flood plains.

Check out a great I.I.I. backgrounder on climate change and insurance issues here.

I.I.I. chief actuary James Lynch digs into the data in an informative piece on loss trend factors:

Actuaries can be buggy about numbers, to say the least, and my article in this month’s Actuarial Review — a publication of the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) – looks at a couple of sources of loss trends that can act as useful benchmarks.

The other looks at comp loss trends plus those of about a dozen other lines of business and has information going back to the 1930s, if you do a little digging. Older actuaries remember it as the Masterson Index, named after a Stevens Point, Wisconsin, actuary who created it and maintained it until relatively recently. Now Towers Watson actuaries have taken over the calculation.

As a sidebar, I also looked at the way the federal government measures auto inflation, including how it handles the introduction of predictive models and other overhauls to rating plans.

But companies are uncertain of how much insurance coverage to acquire and whether their current policies provide them with protection, according to a new report by Guy Carpenter.

It speculates that one of the roots of the uncertainty stems from the difficulty in quantifying potential losses because of the dearth of historical data for actuaries and underwriters to model cyber-related losses.

It notes that in the United States, ISO’s revisions to its general liability policy form consist primarily of a mandatory exclusion of coverage for personal and advertising injury claims arising from the access or disclosure of confidential information.

Though still in its infancy the cyber insurance market potential is vast, Guy Carpenter reports. It cites Marsh statistics estimating that the U.S. cyber insurance market was worth $1 billion in gross written premiums in 2013 and could reach as much as $2 billion this year.

The European market is currently a fraction of that, at approximately $150 million, but could reach as high as EUR900 million by 2018, according to some estimates.

Guy Carpenter also warns that cyber attacks are now top of mind for governments, utilities, individuals, medical and academic institutions and companies of all sizes, noting:

At first glance the numbers on the property insurance provided by the nation’s FAIR and Beach and Windstorm plans indicate that attempts by certain states to reduce the size of their plans appear to be paying off.

As you’ll see, the exposure value of the residual property market in hurricane-exposed states has declined significantly from the peak levels seen in 2011. In fact between 2011 and 2013, total exposure to loss in the plans fell by almost 30 percent — from $885 billion to $639 billion.

Why such a drop?

Florida Citizens, a plan that accounts for more than half (51 percent) of the total FAIR Plans’ exposure to loss, saw its exposure drop by nearly 50 percent from $429.4 billion in 2012 to $228.9 billion in 2013, as Citizens took much-needed steps to reduce its size.

This accounted for the overall reduction in total exposure under the FAIR plans. In 2013 total exposure to loss in the FAIR Plans was $445.6 billion, a 38 percent drop from its 2011 peak of $715.3 billion.

But what of the Beach and Windstorm plans?

Latest data show that between 2011 and 2013 exposure to loss in the Beach and Windstorm Plans actually grew by 14 percent.

Five state Beach and Windstorm plans are covered in our report: Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas.

Over a longer time period, 2005 to 2013, the I.I.I. finds that some of the Beach and Windstorm plans saw accelerating growth. For example, total exposure to loss in the Texas Beach Plan (the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association (TWIA)) increased by 230 percent during this period.

A plan that would move TWIA’s policies over to private insurers and depopulate its book of business (much like Florida Citizens has done) is in the works, but so far nothing definite.

An ongoing and arguably more pressing concern is the fact that many of the residual market plans charge rates that are not actuarially sound and do not accurately reflect the risk of loss.

What does this mean? The I.I.I. warns that a major hurricane could expose residents in certain states to billions of dollars in post-storm assessments:

While the composite rate for U.S. commercial property and casualty insurance remains positive, at plus 1 percent in August, it is closing in on flat or no increases and rate reductions are coming, according to online insurance exchange MarketScout.

The epidemic comes from 20 years of gradually increasing use (and abuse) of opioids, a special class of prescription drugs that mimic many of the effects of heroin. Some you may have heard of, like Vicodin or OxyContin. Prescribed legally but highly addictive, they have become the most commonly abused class of drugs in America.

More people die from drug overdoses in America than from car accidents, and opioids lead the tragic parade. In 2010, for example, 16,652 people died from opioid overdoses, more than from heroin and cocaine combined. Opioids toll has tripled since the late 1990s.

My article shows how the growing epidemic played out in workers comp. Narcotics make up 25 percent of workers comp drug costs, and more than 45 percent of narcotics dollars pay for drugs containing oxycodone, according to the National Council on Compensation Insurance.

Insurers have acted as the crisis emerged, and now they as well as federal, state and local officials may be making headway against the problem.

Last week, after my article went to press, AIG’s new chief executive, Peter Hancock, noted his company had teamed with Johns Hopkins University to study opioid abuse among the company’s 23 million workers compensation claims.

“It is a terrible cost to the industry, a terrible cost to employers, and it’s a terrible cost to society,” Hancock told The Wall Street Journal. AIG has medical professionals working with doctors to find ways to alleviate pain without turning to opioids.

The most recent federal action reclassifies any drug containing the opioid hydrocodone as a Schedule II drug, meaning its prescriptions are more tightly controlled than before.

Unfortunately, these actions may be too late to prevent many opioid addicts from switching to heroin. Opioids tantalize the same brain receptors as heroin, and there are signs that addicts deprived of their Oxys switch.

Earthquake exposure is one of the biggest risks to workers compensation insurers, so it’s interesting to read that the California State Compensation Insurance Fund (SCIF) is once again looking to the capital markets to provide reinsurance protection for workers comp losses resulting from earthquakes.

This is a repeat of the first catastrophe bond sponsored by the SCIF in 2011 — Golden State Re Ltd sized at $200 million — which is due to expire in January 2015.

The Golden State Re II catastrophe bond issuance is expected to be sized at $150 million or more, and will cover the SCIF until January 2019.

While the covered area is for earthquakes events across the United States, Artemis notes that as with the 2011 deal as much as 99.99 percent of the SCIF’s insurance portfolio is focused on California, so the risk is primarily focused on California-area earthquakes.

The new deal apparently carries a similar modeled loss trigger to the 2001 transaction, using the exposures of a notional portfolio of workers compensation risks in the SCIF portfolio, earthquake severity factors (ground motion), geographic distribution of the covered portfolio, types of buildings covered, time of day and the day of week an event occurs as some of the weighting factors.

An earthquake has to be magnitude 5.5 or greater to trigger the catastrophe bond, according to Artemis, and losses after an event will be modeled deterministically, so not related to actual injuries and fatalities, using the earthquake event parameters. This will be modeled against the notional portfolio using day/time weighting to determine an index value and notional modeled loss amount.